Plan Events Collaboratively with PLUQ

PLUQ is a different type of event-planning service: It allows you to engage your friends or coworkers in planning a party, lunch, or major event from the very beginning.

Most online planning services let you plan events, but with most of them you can just pick a time and date, choose the location and type of event, and broadcast the event to others. The only real interaction comes in when your friends say whether they can make it to your event.

PLUQ is a different type of event planning service. It lets you engage your friends or coworkers in planning a party, lunch, or major event from the very beginning.

If you're looking to plan an event, you can always just pick a date and time and send an E-vite; or build a site at Invite43 to tell people about your event and get feedback from the people you'd like to attend. But you still have to do the bulk of the work and then turn your decisions over to your friends for their approval. With PLUQ, you can do as much or as little planning as you like before you involve others in the process.

Before you can use the service, you'll need to sign up for a PLUQ account. Accounts are free, and once you're signed up you can start planning events and working with friends to select the perfect place and time. PLUQ doesn't have a ton of features, and certainly pales in comparison with more mature event-planning services, but its strength lies in how it creates a custom space for you to discuss your plans with the people you've invited.

When you start planning your event, you enter the usual information: the name of the event, what type of event it is, and tags to help you keep your events organized in your account. You can then choose the date or dates you want to block off for the event.

PLUQ gives you a calendar on which you can mark certain days with different colors to indicate to your friends whether they're good days, preferred days, or bad days. So to schedule the next book club meeting or to get together with a busy friend for lunch, you can provide a few days to choose from.

If you like, you can stop here, add the e-mail addresses for your friends, and send the invite to them. They can provide their feedback on your selected dates, propose their own, and then e-mail you back with their input. Other attendees can do the same, discuss with one another, or send you documents or links that you can include in your event page.

If you want to get your attendees' opinion on something specific about your event, you can attach a survey to your PLUQ event. For example, if you're planning a lunch or happy hour for your office, you can propose different locations in a survey and let your coworkers weigh in on where they'd prefer to go. Once a location is chosen, you can even upload the menu for the winning location.

PLUQ certainly isn't the most feature-rich event planning service out there, and it's certainly not the flashiest, but it's one of the simplest and most streamlined. And the focus on usability and collaboration make it perfect for planning events with coworkers, teams, and other groups where a little professionalism is called for.